over 58% were for non-violent crimes [p. 28] 14,154 (37%) out of a total of 38,626 persons who spent some time in full custody between June 1995 and June 1999, have been to prison at least once before, and almost half of those (18%) have been at least twice. [p. 31] “the majority of prisoners who pass through the system serve sentences of less than 6 months and are in minimum security or serving periodic detention. [p.32] From these and other statistics, researchers [including Wright, 1982; Sutherland & Cressey, 1960; Melossi, 1998; Rusche, 1998; Duff, 1994; Carlen, 1994] and Mann, 1995] have suggested utilitarian justifications cannot be overwhelming assumed from the studied data. One conclusion that can and is often drawn from prison statistics, however, is that: Whatever regional and national differences there might be in opinions about which offences deserve custody, the poor, the disturbed, the migrant, [and] disadvantaged ethnic minorities are consistently over-penalised and over-imprisoned. [Hudson, 1993:3] What then is the reason that we imprison these people? Utilitarianists have no answer. Marxist theories of punishment These theories offer explanations as to why we imprison offenders not with claims of crime preventions, but that it is done with the goal of controlling those groups “whose socially disadvantaged position makes them volatile, disaffected and thus threatening”, Duff, 1994:306]. Criminal conduct is not a lower class monopoly, but is distributed throughout the various classes. But as has been shown, the same is not true of the distribution of punishment, which falls, overwhelmingly and systematically, on the poor and the disadvantaged. Discriminatory decision-making throughout the whole criminal justice system ensures that the socially advantaged are routinely filtered out: they are given the benefit of the doubt, or are defined as good risks, or simply have access to the best legal advice. Serious, deep-end punishments such as imprisonment are predominantly reserved for the unemployed, the poor, the homeless, the mentally ill, the addicted, and those who lack social support and personal assets. Increasingly, this class bias had taken on a racial complexion, as disadvantaged minority groups come to be massively over-represented in the prison population., Duff, 1994:306] The benefits of using a marxist framework to answer this question is that it allows us to understand why offenders from the working class are imprisoned and offenders from the middle/upper classes are not. Marxist theory is based upon the idea of class struggle and ideology.